Jharkhand's tourism department said on Thursday it is working to develop the closed and abandoned mines in the state into active tourist destinations.

"Mining tourism is to be developed following best practices from other parts of the world," said a statement from the department, citing Director (tourism) Prasad Krishna Waghmare.

"The state government intends to develop closed mines and transform the abandoned mines as a tourist destination."

The move comes after the department studied mining tourism in Australia, Chile, Canada, Norway and other countries.

"This could be a different experience for the visitors and tourists who visit the state. The government is already in talks with several mine operators for the same," Waghmare said.

He said his department has also been working on temple tourism as well as biodiversity tourism as part of a new policy.

There is going to be a development of the medieval terracotta temples of 'Maluti' as a tourist hotspot.

Maluti temples are a group of 78 terracotta temples built between the 17th and 19th centuries in the Maluti village of Jharkhand's Dumka district.

According to officials, Jharkhand has seen a rising graph of visitors from outside the state, from 23,991 tourists in the year 2000 when the state was formed to 33,179,530 (including 1,67,855 foreigners) in 2015.

Jharkhand currently holds ninth rank in the country in terms of visitors, and the state government is committed to take the state to the top of the country's tourist table, Waghmare said.

Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article.

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Japan's Toyota Motor is planning to introduce a telecommute system, which will allow around 25,000 employees to do most of their work from home, to improve work-life balance, the company announced Thursday.

The world's leading automaker is at present negotiating the plan with trade unions and hopes to put it in action by early August, a company spokesperson told EFE news.

The programme could be extended to almost a third of the company's 72,000 strong workforce.

The measure will affect those who have been working in Toyota for over five years and those working in the company's headquarters in Aichi prefecture in the human resource, accounts or sales departments, along with those engaged in research and development and other engineering fields.

The plan will allow these employees to work from home most of the time and go to office for a minimum of only two hours per week.

To prevent any kind of data leakage, the company will allocate employees computers that will only function as client terminals to a cloud computing system.

Toyota hopes this flexible system of working will help it retain its skilled and experienced human capital by allowing male employees to devote more time to their children and encouraging female employees not to leave their jobs after getting married or having a baby (a common practice in Japan).

It will also help the automaker reduce the number of employees who leave their jobs to take care of their elderly parents, in a rapidly ageing society.

Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article.

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National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has fixed ceiling prices of 56 scheduled formulations under Drug Price Control Orders (DPCO). NPPA has also fixed retail prices (ex-local taxes) of eight formulations. This has been done through two notifications from NPPA.

According to Religare Institutional Research, the impact on most pharmaceutical sector players and their financials is likely to be limited. Its analysis of affected products indicates that the impact is likely to be marginal– less than 0.5% of domestic revenues– for most players. However, Novartis will be hit by the cap on retail price of its key brand Voveran 100mg (about 35% cut in price), which would in turn affect the company’s annual sales adversely by 4.8%. This fall in sales has been computed without assuming any mitigating impact from higher volumes due to the lower price, point out Religare analysts.

Religare believes that Augmentin– GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s key brand– could see a combined impact of about Rs400mn or a 20% price cut due to the revised ceiling price. This along with the impact on Cetzine could hurt GSK’s annual revenues by about 1.2%, according to the research note from Religare.

Religare believes that domestic market growth in FY17 is likely to remain muted due to (a) uncertainty over ban of fixed-dose combination (FDC) drugs, (b) a negative WPI (wholesale price index) leading to price cuts (by about 2.75%) in NLEM (National List of Essential Medicine) drugs, and (c) recent extension of NLEM list from 348 to 376 drugs.

AIOCD (All Indian Origin Chemists & Distributors) pegs the combined impact at 4%-5% for the sector. Already, there has been muted growth of 3.5% in the month of April 2016, and Religare channel checks suggest that coming months are unlikely to be any better.

The impact of the NPPA notifications on the NLEM drugs, and the revenues of the respective pharmaceutical companies, is given in the table below:

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COMMENTS

Dr Anantha K Ramdas

6 months ago

To my mind this is a farce. I will explain why. When Jan Aushadi was launched, it was expected to cover 504 essential medicines. And the DOP (Department of Pharmaceuticals) were supposed do to many follow up actions. In an article, published in the Moneylife, on 4th Feb 2015, the writer (i.e. myself) had requested that the Ministry of Health give wide publicity, identify the suppliers of generic medicines, ensure the printing of senior citizen's dis counts (where applicable) etc. This was followed up by writing to the Prime Minister's office for putting into effective action as this launch would help "aam aadmi". Promptly and efficiently, the PMO took up the issue with Secretary, Department of Pharmaceuticals vide their letter PMOPG/D/2015/0228776 on 24th September 2015.

As far as I know, the PMO's letter is collecting dust in the DoP. Prices of essential medicines are regularly increased and pharmaceutical shops simply cannot do anything.
There is no check and follow up on policies of such importance and nobody explains any justification for increasing the cost of medicines that sick citizens are forced buy and pay through their nose! If they do not make huge profits, how else can they pay high dividends? What prevents the Government (Ministry of Health) to promulgate an ordinance on pricing?

NIKUNJ H CHHAG

6 months ago

These moves from the current Govt are great but simultaneously there needs to cap the freebies these companies offer to the doctors and other players as all these accounts for the final costing of each medicine.